The Rightwing Limitations of Ken O’Keefe

I was recently asked what I thought of the rhetoric of the former US Marine (and First Gulf War Veteran) Ken O’Keefe. I must confess that I had not heard of him, and so headed to YouTube to spend a few days listening to his public lectures, speeches and media interviews, coupled with reading articles about him. On the surface, and at the first point of contact, Ken O’keefe appears to be truly ‘revolutionary’, but anyone of the left must show caution here. Ken O’keefe is certainly not leftwing, and quite often espouses an open admiration and association with the far-right neo-Nazi cause, once stating that the only thing Adolf Hitler did wrong was to withdraw Nazi Germany from the world banking system. Ken O’Keefe says this because he believes the Jewish holocaust never happened during WWII – and that Adolf Hitler was a victim of a world Jewish conspiracy. Ken O’Keefe claims to support the Palestinian cause (mimicking the attitude of the political left), but in so doing, he mistakenly equates Zionism (i.e. Jewish White Supremacy racism) with all Jewish people, and the Jewish religion. This is completely wrong. Many Jewish people in Israel ‘reject’ Zionism, as do thousands of Jews around the world. Zionism has nothing to do with the religion of Judaism, but was invented by a small number of White (secular) European Jews in the 19th century, and when combined with terrorism, was used as the justifying ideology underpinning the formation of the modern State of Israel and the subsequent (and ongoing) prosecution of the Palestinian people. In fact, so racist has been many of Ken O’keefe’s outbursts, that even Palestinian groups have stated publically that they reject his ‘anti-Semitism’, because they reject all forms of racism. Furthermore, for a man who makes an ample living by lecturing about how he has purportedly ‘seen through’ the conditionality of society and social programming through the US media, he nevertheless has stated that he believed as ‘true’ the supposed events of ‘Tiananmen Square’ in 1989 (reported by the same US media), apparently unaware that Wikileaks has made public the Reagan government’s diplomatic records (to and from the US Embassy in Beijing) stating that ‘nothing happened’ in Tiananmen Square – but that President Reagan ordered that the US and UK media networks were to (falsely) create a narrative that a ‘massacre’ had occurred (a deception supported by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). Of course, Ken O’Keefe is not alone in believing this nonsense (see Billy Bragg), but the fact that a man who presents himself as a revolutionary maverick fully supports the US establishment’s policy of anti-Chinese racism, is indicative of the limitations of his own perception, and exposes the true rightwing (anarchist) nature of his rhetoric. In reality he does not really support Palestine, but uses this situation to justify and support his anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish attitudes – pretending that he is somehow opposing ‘Zionism’. In reality, Ken O’Keefe is as racist as the Zionism he claims to be fighting. Jewish people are not, and have never been the problem – the problem is Zionist racism! Many groups and associations that invite Ken O’keefe to talk are rightwing and a priori anti-Socialist – again mistakenly associating world Judaism with Marxism – as if the two are the same – or that both are somehow deficient! This is pure neo-Nazi rhetoric which must be clearly discerned when listening to the range of Ken O’Keefe’s otherwise anti-establishment outbursts!